Professors Lauren Berlant and Kristen Schilt participate in a zine making workshop

Professor Hillary Chute and Alison Bechdel

Students participate in a classroom discussion at CSGS

The Community Room at 5733 S University

Center entrance

CSGS Fellows in 2011

The exterior of 5733 S University

A student asks a question after a talk by Kimberly Peirce in October 2011

Affiliated Faculty

Anthropology

Associate Professor

Prof. Brotherton’s scholarship is concerned with theoretical and ethnographic debates of the body as a subject of anthropological, historical, psychoanalytic, medical, and literary inquiry. His ethnographic work in Argentina, Cuba, and Jamaica have allowed him to explore diverse themes such as the mind/body dualism, experiences of embodiment/alienation, phenomenology of the body, Foucauldian notions of bio‐politics and bio‐power, in addition to the medicalized, gendered, and racialized body.

Associate Professor

Prof. Dawdy is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist whose fieldwork focuses on the American South and Gulf of Mexico (esp. Louisiana, eastern Mexico, Cuba, 17th c.-present). Her current research and teaching focus on piracy and informal economies, aesthetics, affect, and sensoria, temporality, gender and sexuality, fetish and thing theory, death and disaster. Prof. Dawdy's current book project called Patina: A Profane Archaeology of Romantic Things, which reconsiders the intimate relations of capitalism—between people as well as between people and things—with attention to temporality, gender, and affect.

Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Gal is presently doing research on the political economy of language, including linguistic nationalism, language and gender, and especially the rhetorical and symbolic aspects of political transformation in contemporary eastern Europe and post socialism generally. Her work focuses as well on the construction of gender and discourses of reproduction.

Neukom Family Professor

Prof. Morrison studies the archaeology and historical anthropology of South Asia with a focus on precolonial and early colonial South India. Her interests include state formation and power relations, agricultural organization and change, colonialism and imperialism, landscape history, urbanism, urban-rural relations, botanical analysis, Holocene hunting and gathering, and the integration of archaeological, historical, and ecological analysis.

Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Silverstein studies language structure and its functional contextualization, language history and prehistory, the anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition (and their development), and history of linguistic and ethnographic studies. His fieldwork in northwestern North America and northwestern Australia has been the basis of various descriptive, theoretical and generalizing contributions. He is also investigating language use and textuality as sites of contestation and transformation of cultural value in contemporary American society, reconceptualizing sociocultural and rhetorical practices in light of the semiotic anthropology of communication.

Art History

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor

Prof. Atkinson's research interests are in architecture and urban history in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy. Situated primarily in Italy, his current scholarship considers the social dimensions of architecture through a series of research themes derived from his interest in the historical understanding of urban experience.

Assistant Professor of Art History and the College

Patrick R. Crowley specializes in the art and archaeology of the Roman world. In addition to traditional categories of Roman art such as sarcophagi and portraiture, his research interests include ancient aesthetics, theories of vision and representation, and historiography.

Associate Professor

Prof. Kumler's scholarly work is on western medieval art and architecture. Her research interests include visual forms of theological discourse, translation and its theorizations, the illumination of didactic literature, late medieval antiquarianism, allegory and allegoresis in the visual arts, and the semiotics of the Eucharist.

Associate Professor

Prof. Ward specializes in 19th and 20th century art. Her research interests center on the reception of works of art and on the relationship between the theory, criticism and practice of painting, the history of exhibitions and museums.

Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Wu works on early Chinese art. His special research interests include relationships between visual forms (architecture, bronze vessels, pictorial carvings and murals, etc.) and ritual, social memory, and political discourses.

Biological Sciences

Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pediatrics

Chief, Family Planning

Dr. Gilliam conducts research on unintended pregnancy. Her research focuses on contraception, family planning, youth development, and sexually transmitted infections. Specifically, she focuses on contraceptive use among teens and women who are at risk for unintended pregnancy.

Professor of Medicine

Dr. Kim's interests include colon cancer chemoprevention, colon cancer screening for average risk and high risk populations, especially hereditary colon cancer syndromes, with an emphasis on underserved and minority populations. She is actively involved in health disparities research as it relates to GI malignancies. In addition, Dr. Kim's clinical interests have included the education and awareness of hepatitis B in Asian Americans through screening, advocacy, treatment and immunization for liver cancer prevention.

Senior Lecturer, BSCD

Mr. Osadjan is interested in the influence that biology has on the formation of gender. He studies and teaches this primarily from the human perspective but also from the perspective of humans as animals. His class for non-biology majors considers what science says about the biology of the sexes, from genes to behaviors and beyond. His academic interests include adaptation to stressful environments, comparative physiology and neuroscience.

Cinema & Media Studies

Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies, Associate Professor

Prof. Wild's research focus on the history and theory of modernism and the avant-garde, feminist theory, experimental film, French cinema, the history of exhibition, and the cinema's relation to the other arts work Her work explores problems of film historiography and aesthetics. She is the director of CSGS' Counter Cinema/Counter Media Project.

Classics

Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Bartsch-Zimmer's teaching is primarily devoted to Roman literature and culture, and her research addresses critical terms for the study of Classics and the satirist Persius. Her research interests have recently been focused on the study of ancient Greco-Roman sexuality, especially the relationship between same-sex eros and philosophical thought.

Associate Professor

Prof. Wray's teaching interests are mostly within Greek, Roman, and early modern European literature, including courses on incest in Roman literature and heroines of ancient tragedy and early modern opera. He has written on manhood in Roman poetry and is currently focusing on relations and relatedness in classical epic and drama.

Comparative Human Development

Professor

Prof. Cole's scholarship attempts to analyze the interplay between historical change and individual experience, her work addresses the substantive topics of memory and forgetting, youth and generational change, gender, sexuality and transnational kinship.

Associate Professor

Prof. Mateo studies developmental and biological mechanisms of adaptive behaviors that enhance survival and reproduction in species-typical environments. In particular, she investigates the reciprocal interactions among social, hormonal and genetic processes and how they differentially affect behavior depending on ecological and social contexts.

Assistant Professor

Anna S. Mueller is a sociologist whose research examines adolescent health and wellbeing over the transition to adulthood. Her most current work involves an in-depth mixed methods investigation of suicide in adolescence and pays particular attention to the roles of gender, social relationships, and social contexts in the development of suicidality.

William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Shweder's recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He examines the norm conflicts that arise when people migrate from Africa, Asia and Latin America to countries in the 'North,' bringing with them culturally endorsed practices (e.g., arranged marriage, animal sacrifice, circumcision of both girls and boys, ideas about parental authority) that mainstream populations in the United States or Western Europe sometimes find aberrant and disturbing. He asks how much accommodation to cultural diversity occurs and ought to occur under such circumstances.

Comparative Literature

Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Meltzer's specialties are nineteenth-century French and German literatures and critical theory. She has particular interest in psychoanalysis and literature, French Symbolism, and philosophy.

Divinity

Associate Professor of Theology

Prof. Culp works in constructive theology, especially in relation to feminist theologies. She has written on protest and resistance as theological themes and religious sensibilities, on a theology of Christian community, on feminist and womanist theologies, and on "experience" in contemporary theology.

Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Doniger's research and teaching interests revolve around two basic areas, Hinduism and mythology. Her courses in mythology address themes in cross-cultural expanses, and her courses in Hinduism cover a broad spectrum that, in addition to mythology, considers literature, law, gender, and psychology. Cross-cultural offerings have included courses about death, dreams, evil, horses, sex, and women.

Interim Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity
Associate Faculty in the Department of History

Ms. Pick is a historian of medieval religious thought and practice. Her current research and teaching interests include the relationships between gender and religion, connections between historical writing and theology, the development of monastic thought and practice, reading and writing as spiritual exercises, and the ways in which religion shapes lives through ritual.

East Asian Languages & Civilization

Associate Professor

Prof. Choi's research and teaching evolve around the relationship between the culture of publication and the historical experiences of modern Koreans, including the experiences of Japanese colonial rule, national division, the Korean War, the Cold War, and democratization. Through exploration of them, she pursues her particular concerns with gender on the one hand and with the literary text as embodied entity on the other.

Associate Professor

Prof. Eyferth's scholarship focuses on the social history of the Chinese countryside in the 20th century and the history of gender, technology, and work. His current research looks at cotton production and textile work in the 1950s, and the impact of the socialist revolution and state industrialization policies on the everyday lives of rural women.

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor

Prof. Zeitlin's research interests include the literary and cultural history of late imperial China with special interest in fiction and drama, especially the classical tale, autobiography and self-representation, gender and sexuality, and the interface between literature and medicine, particularly the case history. She is currently at work on a multi-phase collaborative project on Chinese opera film.

Economics

Post-Doctoral Scholar/Lecturer

Dr. Alessandra L.González is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer at The University of Chicago Department of Economics and Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Previously, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the James Madison Program in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) at Baylor University. Prior to this she worked as a post-doctoral research associate at John Jay College, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Sociology from Baylor University and received a B.A. in Sociology and Policy Studies from Rice University. She is the principal investigator of the Islamic Social Attitudes Survey Project (ISAS), a study in conjunction with Baylor ISR on Islamic Religiosity and Social Attitudes, including Women’s Rights Attitudes in the Arab Gulf Region. She has book chapters in “Women’s Encounter with Globalization” (Frontpage Publications) and “Islam and International Relations: Mutual Perceptions” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), publications in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, and an op-ed on Islamic Feminism in the Dallas Morning News. She has presented her research at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy’s Conference on “The Rights of Women in Islam,” the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, the Dialogue of Civilizations Conference hosted by the Institute for Interfaith Dialogue in Houston, the Gulf Research Conference at the University of Exeter, and various other academic settings. Her latest book manuscript is Islamic Feminism in Kuwait: The Politics and Paradoxes (Palgrave Macmillan Press).

Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Heckman works on problems related to inequality, its origins and the development of capabilities through family investment and social interactions. He has studied women's wages and labor supply and problems of discrimination. He also evaluates public policy using quantitative and qualitative methods.

English Language & Literature

Director of CGS, 1999–2002

George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Berlant's work has focused on the affective components of belonging in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries—now the twenty-first: in particular, in relation to juridical citizenship, to informal and normative modes of social belonging, and to practices of intimacy as they absorb legal, normative, and fantasmatic forces. These scenes of relation articulate state, juridical, and institutional practices of zoning and more abstract boundary-drawing—between public and private, white and non-white, and/or citizen and foreigner—with other kinds of social bonds through which people imagine and practice world-making. She specializes in feminist, queer and Marxian critical theory, cultural studies, literatures of the U.S. 19th and 20th Centuries, African-American studies, cinema studies and popular culture.

Prof. Berlant is co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and Contributing Editor of Public Culture. Recent work includes The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke UP, 1997), Intimacy (Chicago, 2000), with Lisa Duggan, Our Monica, Ourselves (NYU, 2001), with Laura Letinsky, Venus Inferred (Chicago, 2000). Current work focuses on the centrality of sentimental modes of address to public sphere building in the U.S. 20th century, taking "women's culture" as its central case. She is additionally writing a series of essays taking the normative rhetoric of love and pain/trauma as a feature of democratic/capitalist violence.

Assistant Professor

Professor Brown specializes in American and African-American cultural production in the 20th century. Her current work explores the relationships between architecture, race, and narrative forms.

Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture

Prof. Brown's areas of specialization are 19th and 20th-Century American literature, popular genres, Marxist theory and gender theory, naturalism, modern poetry. Recently, he has been working on the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, with an emphasis on "object relations in an expanded field."

Professor

Prof. Hadley's areas of research, writing, and teaching are 19th-Century British history, the novel, popular culture, cultural theory, and expository prose. Her latest book, Living Liberalism, addresses Victorian political culture through political theory, theories of embodiment and the material practices of citizenship. Other central interests often evident in the courses Prof. Hadley offers include gender theory, urban studies, the novel, melodrama, children's culture, theories of nationalism and histories of affect.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Jagoda works in the fields of new media studies and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture with particular interests in digital games, electronic literature, virtual worlds, television, cinema, the novel, and media theory. His first book, Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), explores how literature, films, television, videogames, and digital media art alter human experiences with interconnected life in the early twenty-first century. He is currently at work on a book project about experimental games that draws from fields of affect theory, Marxist theory, and gender studies. For more information, see: http://patrickjagoda.com/.

Associate Professor

Prof. Knight's fields are puritanism, early American literature and culture, and 19th-Century American literature and art. Her research and teaching interests are localized with respect to historical period—Early American Cultures—but broad with respect to interest in discourses, peoples and cultures of the colonial period, and with respect to scholarly method. Her current research focuses on what might be called the "culture of religious emotion" in the context of women's experience in Early America.

Associate Professor

Prof. Miller's fields are late-medieval literature and culture. Miller's research focuses conceptually on the intersections of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory with ethics, theory of action, and philosophical psychology.

Director of CGS, 2006–2009

Associate Professor

Prof. Nelson's research interests are in the areas of contemporary literature, twentieth-century American literature, African American literature, law and literature, literary history, nonfiction prose, poetry and poetics, the novel, feminism, gender and sexuality, and historicism (old and new). Her latest book, Tough Broads: Suffering and Style, explores the unsentimental, rigorous, and often "heartless" view of pain (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt) in the work of some of the twentieth-century's most prominent women artists and intellectuals.

Associate Professor

Prof. Ruddick works on 20th-century British and American fiction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and anthropology & literature. She teaches courses in modern British fiction, literature and psychoanalysis, and poetry and poetics.

Associate Professor

Prof. Scappettone's writing and research focus on new comparative approaches to modernism and modernity, with particular curiosity directed at the filigreed social projections and fallout embodied in literary, spatial, and visual arts. Broadly conceived, research and teaching interests include feminism and aesthetics, poetry and poetics, urbanism and alterations of "landscape," translation, and the fate of the avant-garde.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Simon's interests include the literary and intellectual history of early modern England (as well as the continental Renaissance), the history of philosophy (especially natural philosophy and the philosophy of science), and the theory of emotion (encompassing both historical and recent accounts of passion, desire, affect, and atmosphere). He is completing a book on the "observational mood" in English literature and the rise of experimental science in the seventeenth century.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Thakkar writes and teaches about global Anglophone and postcolonial literatures and contemporary transnational culture. Currently she is working on two projects, a book-length exploration of the political, intellectual, and affective influence that the cultural memory of the Holocaust exerts on postcolonial writers preoccupied with migration to Europe from the former colonies after 1945, and the second on the role of forensic anthropology in examining the bodily remains of victims of mass atrocity.

Gender Studies

Faculty Director of CGS/CSGS, 2010-2016

Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Professor

Prof. Zerilli works in the areas of democratic theory, feminist theory, and continental philosophy.

Germanic Studies

Addie Clark Harding Professor

Levin's recent work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, drama, and cinema. Levin also has worked extensively as a dramaturg for various opera houses in Germany and the United States and for William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet.

History

Director of CGS, 1996–1999

Professor

Prof. Auslander is a social and cultural historian whose focus is on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Social History France and Germany. Her work is in the fields of material culture, the history of consumerism, gender history and theory, social theory and its relation to social history, the history and theory of the everyday, of citizenship, of the nation, Jewish history, and the history of colonial and post-colonial Europe.

Interim Director of CGS, 2009–2010

Associate Professor

Prof. Dailey is a historian of the modern US interested in politics and law, especially relating to questions of civil rights, race and gender.

Norman and Edna Freehling Professor

Prof. Goldstein's research and teaching focus on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, especially France, from the 18th through the 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the development of the human sciences. She recently published the book Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy, which is a microhistory of a Savoyard peasant girl whose strange malady brought her to the attention of the medical community in the 1820s, and her current research project, focused on France but with a comparative dimension, attempts to determine why biologistic theories of human nature shifted their political affiliation around 1850, going from an alliance with the left in the first half of the 19th century to their now more familiar alliance with the right.

Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Gutierrez specializes in Chicana/o history, race and ethnicity in American life, Indian-White relations in the Americas, the social and economic history of the Southwest, colonial Latin America, Mexican immigration and gender and sexuality with regard to American Indians and Chicanas/os.

Assistant Professor

Amy Lippert is Assistant Professor of American History and the College. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural and social history of the United States in the 19th century, with a special interest in the mass production, consumption, and interaction with visual imagery. In the vein of W. J. T. Mitchell’s work in this field, she is interested in visual culture as entrée into the entire manifold of perception, from technologies of vision, forms of spectacle, and image media, as well as the internal issues of memory, gendered and racialized identity, fantasy, and imagination that visuality can bring to bear on our understanding of the past.

Associate Professor

Prof. Lyon's research and teaching focus on the political and social history of Germany, Austria and the Holy Roman Empire in the medieval period, particularly the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. His current research projects include a study of the office of church advocate in medieval Germany and a general survey of the history of the medieval Holy Roman Empire. Prof. Lyon teaches courses on topics relating to the Holy Roman Empire, the European nobility, kingship, and family and marriage.

Associate Professor

Emily Osborn is a social and political historian of West Africa whose research focuses on precolonial and colonial state-craft and gender. Her first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule, investigates a central puzzle in West African political history: why women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period but then vanish altogether with the French colonial occupation of the late nineteenth century. Prof. Osborn's work also considers the history of slavery in Africa, labor and migration, material culture, and processes of technology transfer and diffusion.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Ransmeier teaches courses on Modern China, from the Qing dynasty through the Twentieth Century. Her research explores the relationship between family life and the law in modern China. Current work examines the role of crime in the formation or dissolution of family relationships, as well as the development of legal literacy and a legal imagination in Republican China.

Associate Professor

Prof. Saville's research and teaching are focused on plantation societies of the southern United States and regions of the Caribbean from the 18th through the 20th centuries. She is especially interested in how broad historical changes during the era of trans-Atlantic slave emancipations are related to daily life, the social relations of labor, and popular forms of political expression.

Associate Professor

Prof. Stanley's research and teaching focus on U.S. history, from the early Republic through the Progressive Era. She is especially interested in the intersections of intellectual, social, and legal history, gender, labor, slavery, and emancipation.

Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Stansell is a leading historian of American women, with interests in women's and gender history, antebellum U.S. social and political history, American cultural history, and how societies reconstruct themselves after catastrophes.

Professor

Prof. Zahra's field is modern European history with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the history of migration and displacement; nationalism (and indifference to nationalism); and gender, childhood and the family.

Humanities

Lecturer

Ms. Browning's research and teaching interests are in gender and nationality, gender and cyber-space, and the history of media.

Professor

Prof. Olmsted studies ancient and Renaissance/Reformation English rhetoric and literary history by employing structuralist and rhetorical methods. She has recently worked on Renaissance/Reformation representations of emotions pertinent to competition for honor as they are informed by Homer's epics, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Politics and Roman writers such as Cicero and Quintilian.

Senior Lecturer

Some of Mr. Schultz' research and teaching interests are contemporary social, political, and ethical theory, the history of social, political, and ethical theory, (particularly Anglo-American), LGBTQ studies, and the philosophy of social science.

Law

Arnold I. Shure Professor

Among the subjects Prof. Case teaches are feminist jurisprudence, constitutional law, European legal systems, marriage, and regulation of sexuality. While her diverse research interests include German contract law and the First Amendment, her scholarship to date has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality, and on the early history of feminism.

Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Nussbaum has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights.

Assistant Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar

Laura Weinrib’s focus is twentieth-century American legal history, with an emphasis on the social and cultural history of legal advocacy and ideas. Her teaching and research interests include civil liberties, constitutional law, labor law, and the regulation of gender and the family.

Music

Mabel Greene Myers Professor

Prof. Feldman is a cultural historian of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500–1950, with a concentration on Italy. Her projects have explored the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship in opera, issues of cinema, media, and voice, issues of performance, and various incarnations of the musical artist. Her recent work deals with the life and afterlife of the castrato phenomenon in Rome, including in cinema, literature, psychoanalysis.

Professor

Prof. Kendrick is a music historian specializing in the history of music of early modern Europe and its intersections with religion, politics, gender, urban culture, and fine arts. His publications include Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996), Chiara Margarita Cozzolani: The Complete Motets (A-R Editions, 1998), and The Sounds of Milan, 1585–1650 (2002, Oxford), as well as articles and reviews in Notes, Sixteenth- Century Journal, Music and Letters, Claudio Monteverdi: Studi e prospettivi, La musica italiana in Germania nei secoli XVI-XVII, and Il santuario della Madonna a Saronno. In addition, he has edited works in Women Composers: Music through the Ages (1995– ).

Near Eastern Languages & Civilization

Associate Professor

Prof. Bashkin's research interests include Arab intellectual history, modern Iraqi history and the history of Arab-Jews in Iraq and Israel.

Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature

Prof. Hayek works on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in Arabic literature from the 19th C to the present. Her current research explores the transnational imaginings of Lebanese diaspora through the lens of the sexual, racial and national anxieties that emigration elicits within Lebanon.

Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor

Her main interests include Egyptian language and Egypt in the "Late Period" (1st millennium B.C.).

Professor

Prof. Roth researches and publishes on the legal and social history of the ancient Near East. Her primary interests have been on family law and on women's legal and social issues, and on the compilation and transmission law norms. Currently, she is working on a project on Mesopotamian law cases.

Philosophy

David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor

Prof. Vogler's research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism. She has published essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas.

Political Science

David and Mary Winton Green Professor

Prof. Cohen's general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Kasimis writes and teaches on classical Greek and contemporary political thought, democratic citizenship and migration, ideas of difference, and feminist thought and queer theory.

Associate Professor

Prof. Markell has wide-ranging interests in contemporary political and social theory and the history of political thought. He is especially interested in the disparate theoretical traditions that trace their roots back to Kant, Hegel, and Marx; in the political thought of Greek and Roman antiquity, as reflected in literature as well as philosophy, and its reception by later thinkers; in 19th and 20th century American political thought, especially on the Left; in the history of the intellectual self-understandings of political theorists inside and outside the discipline of political science; and in several areas of 20th-century and contemporary theory and philosophy that cut across the distinction between "continental" and "Anglo-American," including feminist and queer theory, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language.

Mary R. Morton Professor

Prof. Wedeen specializes in comparative politics, the Middle East, political theory, and feminist theory. She is currently working on a book about ideological interpellation, neoliberal autocracy, and generational change in present-day Syria.

Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Professor

Prof. Zerilli's research subjects range across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. Her current book project is titled Towards a Democratic Theory of Judgment.

Psychology

Professor

Prof. Beilock's research program sits at the intersection of cognitive science and education; she explores the cognitive and neural substrates of skill learning as well as the mechanisms by which performance breaks down in high-stress or high-pressure situations.

David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. McClintock was the first researcher to discover menstrual synchronization among human females while still an undergraduate at Wellesley College. Her current research focuses on the interaction between behavior and reproductive endocrinology and immunology, focusing on the behavioral control of endocrinology, in addition to the hormonal and neuroendocrine mechanisms of behavior. Working with both animal and parallel clinical processes in humans, Prof. McClintock studies pheromones, sexual behavior, fertility and reproductive hormones; she also studies the psychosocial origins of malignant and infectious disease, applying this to the dramatic health disparity in cancer promoting genes between African-American women and women of Northern European ancestry.

Romance Languages & Literatures

Associate Professor

Professor Delogu's scholarship focuses on the political literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and also includes articles on late medieval lyric works. She sees her research as grappling with the ways in which individuals construct their sense of identity in relation to a social order that is itself in flux, subject to conflict and renegotiation of roles. In her current book project, provisionally titled Power, Gender, and Lineage in Late Medieval France: 'douce France' and the University of Paris, 'fille du roy', she looks at the diverse literary responses to the political troubles that plagued the reign of Charles VI (1380–1422).

Associate Professor

Prof. James' research and teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first century French literature, with a particular focus on postwar experimental writing (both poetry and prose), the Oulipo group, representations of everyday life, and the connections between literature and philosophy.

Associate Professor

Prof. Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. She is also the author of numerous essays that address the interconnections between queer sexualities, gender and anti-colonial politics in twentieth-century Puerto Rico.

Professor

Prof. Maggi's scholarship includes works on Renaissance and baroque culture, literature, and philosophy with particular focus on treatises on love, religious texts, and the relationship of word and image. He is also an expert of Christian mysticism, with works on medieval, Renaissance, and baroque women mystics. His latest works are a book on the modern poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and an edited volume on Petrarch.

Professor

Prof. Norman focuses on the literature of French and European seventeenth and eighteenth century, and theater across the ages. His interests include theater history, book history, intellectual and cultural history, literary criticism and theory, relation between the visual arts and literature.

Associate Professor

Prof. Steinberg's scholarship focuses on medieval Italian literature, especially on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, the early lyric, manuscript culture, and literary historiography. His interests include the intersection of legal and literary culture and the history of the book.

Prof. West's scholarly work concentrates on the areas of modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture, especially lyric poetry and narrative, on Italian and Italian American cinema, and on gender studies, with a particular interest in feminist theory and practice, and constructions of masculinity.

Slavic Languages & Literatures

Professor

Over the years, Prof. Shallcross' research interests have evolved from the focus on the verbal-visual interrelationship through the questions of identity, in particular, those manifested in diverse modes of habitation to a discourse on objects and material culture.

Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies

My work on gender and sexuality abides in spaces where the uneasy tension between its essentialist and constructivist discourses dwells and so it is mass culture phantasies, especially as these are mediatized in horror and thriller films, manga, and objects (toys, decor, chachkies). This research has so far focused on narratives and enactments of transgender "monstrosity," child sexuality, and rape and rape revenge. My work also looks to canonical literature and art—and these also vis-à-vis their popular imaginaries. Here I concentrate on the work of Vladimir Nabokov, (global) Surrealism, and the theory and fiction of Georges Bataille.

Social Service Administration

Assistant Professor

Prof. Bouris' primary research areas are in the identification of parental influences on adolescent and young adult sexual behavior and health. She is particularly interested in developing interventions and practice recommendations to help parents prevent sexually transmitted infections, HIV infection, and unplanned pregnancies among their adolescent and young adult children.

Associate Professor

Prof. Carr is interested in the ways people talk about social problems, and how that talk shapes social work interventions. She sustains particular interests in cultural and clinical theories of addiction, the politics of therapeutic practices, and both everyday and explicitly formalized modes of political communication-especially in relation to gender, race and sexuality. Her current research focuses on American social workers' theories of language, and how those theories influence interactions with clients.

Associate Professor

Prof. Henly's fields of special interest include family poverty, child care and welfare policy, work-family strategies of low-wage workers, informal support networks, and employment discrimination.

Associate Professor

Professor Johnson teaches social welfare policy and human behavior in the social environment and research methods. A family research scholar, his substantive research focuses on male roles and involvement in African American families, nonresident fathers in fragile families, and the physical and psychosocial health statuses of African American males. As a research methodologist, he is interested in the use of qualitative research methods in guiding policy and practice research.

George Herbert Jones Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Marsh is broadly interested in the organization and delivery of social services and in treatment process and outcome, especially for services and treatments with women and children. Her current research focuses on gender differences in the impact of substance abuse treatment with a particular focus on the role of the client-provider relationship.

Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor

Prof. Roderick is an expert in urban school reform, high stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students' school careers and her new work examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School students. In prior work, Professor Roderick led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion. She has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. She is an expert in mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation.

Associate Professor

Prof. Sites' fields of interest include urban studies, community organization, politics, movements and social theory. He teaches courses in political processes, urban political economy, community organization, and the role of theory in research. His current research interests include contemporary immigrant mobilization, the history of labor politics and urban governance in the American metropolis, and the political economy of music and culture in post-World War II Chicago

Sociology

William Rainey Harper Professor

Prof. Clemens works at the intersection of political, organizational, and historical sociology. Her past research addressed the role of social movements and voluntary organizations in processes of institutional change. Her 1997 book The People's Lobby was based on comparisons of labor, agrarian, and women's associations. Her current research addresses how formal political institutions structure organizational fields in the context of both state expansion and contemporary policies of privatization. Prof. Clemens is now completing a book that traces the tense but powerful entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in the development of the American nation-state.

Assistant Professor

Kimberly Kay Hoang’s research interests center on sociology of gender, globalization, economic sociology, and qualitative methods. A central focus of her work is to understand the gendered dynamics of deal brokering in Southeast Asia’s emerging markets. In 2015, she published the monograph Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work that examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. This ethnography takes an in-depth and personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with relationships of intimacy in Vietnam’s informal economy.

She is currently conducting research for her second book project, which involves a comparative study of the articulation of inter-Asian flows of capital and foreign investment in Southeast Asia.
.

George H. Mead Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Laumann's many research interests include research on human sexuality among older Americans, cross-nationally (in 29 countries and in China), sexuality in urban places, the spread of sexually transmitted infections via sexual networks, subjective well-being, quality of life, and health status, social networks in various social contexts, and the urban legal profession.

Associate Professor

Prof. Schilt's research areas are at the intersections between gender and sexuality research, with particular attention to the workplace. Her recent book, Just One of the Guys?, focuses on the experiences of transgender men in the workplace.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Song’s research interests include social stratification and mobility, demography, demographic and quantitative methods. Her research examines the origin of social inequality from a multigenerational perspective, linking individuals’ social achievement to the past socioeconomic status history and reproductive behaviors of their ancestral families. Her ongoing work uses family genealogies, longitudinal data, and linked population registers from China and the United States to examine roles of paternal and maternal family ancestry in shaping social outcomes of descendants.

Associate Professor

Prof. Trinitapoli works at the intersection of social demography and the sociology of religion, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her current work is concerned with sexual and reproductive health, including fertility, and cultural change.

Lucy Flower Professor

Prof. Waite's research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, working families, the link between biology, psychology and the social world. Her current research focuses on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a study which has at its core a national survey of older adults first interviewed in 2005 and 2006.

South Asian Languages & Civilizations

Associate Professor

Prof. Ebeling's research interests include modern and classical Tamil language and literature, in particular nineteenth-century literary culture, South Indian cultures, religion in Angkorean Cambodia, and comparative literary studies. Currently he is working on two book projects: a history of the present moment in contemporary Tamil writing, mapping the genealogies of contemporary Tamil literary production from a global perspective; and a monograph with the working title The Imperial Rise of the Novel, which will address the connections between Western imperialism, Asian modernities and the global history of the novel, discussing a wide range of texts from Europe and Asia (India, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia).

Associate Professor

Prof. Majumdar's interests span histories of Indian cinema, gender and marriage in colonial India, and Indian intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently engaged in two projects: a history of the film society movement in India from 1947 to 1977, and an intellectual history of key concepts such as society, civility, and civilization in the Hindu and Muslim Bengali contexts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Visual Arts

Professor of Practice

Prof. Hoffman's research interests include documentary cinema and video, video and film production, ethnographic film and issues of representation and cultural ownership, cinéma verité and the participant camera, The Guerilla Television Movement, political film and video, and Chicago Film History.

Professor

Prof. Letinsky's research and artistic interests include the artistic practice of black and white and color photography, feminist issues of representation and identity in mainstream genres—in particular romance, erotica, and pornography—land visual cultures of art and cinema.